God of the Forest
by ocii
Summary: Slenderman: The more you know about him the closer he gets. A mythological figure who follows those who fear him. You can't be curious, but are you? Maybe it was he who led you here, that God of the Forest. Let me tell you about him, about the Faceless One, about the Tall One, about the One Who Watches Now, my Little One.
1. Chapter 1: Love

The world was dark and tasted like mold and wood. Taste was my first impression of the world, and my only smell and my only sight. Rotted wood, mushrooms, and bitter spores were the first of my sights.

The past was, to me, something that went on forever. I don't know how old I am. Standing in one spot, still as the rotting wood of the forest, would feel to me as though I had been in that little space forever, looming over rotting leaves and fuzzy twigs, feeling both insignificant and powerful, moving only slightly to ward off biting insects and the itch of humidity. But back then I was simple. Knowing no language, no colors, and only the sounds of the forest, I knew only what nature intended for me – or, rather, what I _believed_ she had intended for me. I knew that if it rained I could hide under the rotted wood. If I was cold, I would find a patch of warmth – I did not know yet that this was _sun_ – and soon I learned that tilting my face up to it let the warmth travel through my veins. Through it nature put happiness into my heart and mind and I knew little else.

I suppose it is my first years I remember best, those years when I learned what the forest offered and felt each individual shape of every type of leaf, simply because it was new to me. I remember those first scents, and I remember not long later learning the smell of flowers and tasting the smell of pollen. I remember warmth, what I now know as "summer," and I remember the strange smell of autumn and every tree falling into sleep but me. I remember the loneliness of winter, how the only birds I heard where those who sang loneliness into every ice chipped note, and I remember the cold that left me barely able to think that even the sun couldn't cure between the few times I could find it. Winters were lonely times.

As every season repeated itself again and again, I began to look forward to summers, to birds chirping and landing on me as the youngest failed to fly. I began to dread winters, so much that when I smelled the first sign of autumn I could instantly feel the sun sadden in my heart. I would feel the loneliness before its time and dread the silence, the taste of cold, the lack of a happy bird or brute insect or careful mouse. I began to feel like I had existed forever, and I could no longer remember my beginning or appreciate each thing as I had once been able to. Everything faded into one existence, and during one winter I began to realize that it was possible that I had no purpose.

When the idea first appeared I was too simple to understand it. I don't know how long ago it was – for all I know the thought was born a thousand years ago or just one. But once it was born it loomed in the back of my mind, ever present even in summer.

Strangely it was winter when I met Auha. It didn't seem strange to me at the time, nor did the name, for the name belonged to a deer. And as you know a deer does not know English. You also know that an English spelling does a name no justice, but only makes it ugly and raw. If only you could hear it, if only I could hear her say her own name! I was blind but I am not deaf, and her tone and her breath were enough to tell me she trusted me.

It was what I suppose could have been a field. In a ray of sun, I waited for the chill to escape my bones, knowing full well that it couldn't until I tasted the first flower of spring. Like a tree I stand straight, but like a tree I hold many branches. It was a strange change in that lonely cycle to finally have another first. That first was a cold, moist thing touching a branch and nuzzling. I didn't yet know that that huff was language.

Every winter was a time I would be so hungry that I would feel a gnawing numbness in my belly, numbed both by grinding hunger and frozen limbs. Something in Auha wasn't wet and frozen, and she nuzzled me with a soft, warm body and put something cold but leafy and edible into my hands. It tasted as sweet and the first meal of spring, and with her warmth I enjoyed winter for the first time.

She didn't stay pressed against me forever. Soon she moved free, and I heard the sound of four hooves (I was quite proud of my deduction) and a huff – "ah-huh." _Auha_, _Auha_. It didn't take me long to realize this was her voice telling me her name. (I was proud of being able to realize this, too.) It didn't take her long to realize that the noises I made back were, to her, deer nonsense. She named me Fauha, which only sounds as beautiful as it did when a deer huffed it. I know this because when I followed her she would say it over and over, and it could mean nothing else. Sometimes she would say it with fright, as when I first moved. I moved as I always had, with tens of branches lifting me up and moving me forward like a delicate spider, which she hadn't expected. But she tamed me quickly.

She allowed me to stay with her and follow her silently to her places of rest. She moved around often, with a few friends who were also girls. My first time there, I swooped into the "herd" silently as she had directed, and as her friends huffed in fright she huffed back, "_Fauha, Fauha!_" I knew she was prancing about me, trying to show them I was harmless, and only some of them believed her. A few of them fled, and while many come back, some we never saw again. One who didn't flee came over and sniffed my face, and I stayed still as a dead tree in winter as she huffed angrily in my face. She wasn't happy with me, and she left, taking at least two others with her, but Auha stay by me. Or rather, she allowed me to stay by her.

Her remaining friends accepted me quickly, and quickly I awoke to any one of them huffing, "Fauha, fihhf." I've supposed that meant, "Fauha, get up," or, "Fauha, good morning." It was said with affection, whatever it was, and they seemed pleased when I attempted to return it.

Their scent eventually became part of my own, so well that the first spring I spent with them, the best spring I had ever known, the first male deer I ever met was only curious about me for a moment. He considered me one of the girls, I suppose, though nothing compared to Auha or her sister.

With the scent of mold and spores coming back into the air, I felt my bones thaw. Auha didn't seem to need this stillness to let loose the ice on her fur, but she was patient with me and even assisted me. But well into the cold spring nights and the beginning of warm nights between spring and summer, I began to feel more and more at home. It felt purposeful to me, no matter how simple it was. With summer came that smell of mold, and with that, the simple happiness I knew before. But there was a small chip of ice behind my heart that chirped at night like those lonely winter birds, and something in me seemed to understand that the seasons of the day – cool, warmth, hottest, cooling, and cool – meant that those cool nights in summer were really just a reminder of the winter that would have to come back.

When it did didn't matter to me at the time. I felt endless, and felt like we, Auha and them and I, were too. Before long there was no beginning with me and Auha; we had been together since the beginning of time, and all our days began to blur together. This blur, though, was pleasant. One day I would learn the word for this was rough and edged: "_love_." But to be said by her was beautiful and somehow, in my own mind, soft. Like the first bird of spring, with his voice cracked from fresh awakening, before the first pang of hunger in his belly sets him searching.

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**Author's Note: Hope you enjoy this. :) I redid this chapter in response to a few comments saying the reader wasn't even sure if this was about Slender Man. It is. :P Thank you for reading, and thank you for your reviews so far. Feel free to review, it makes me happy. You don't have to, but I will love you more if you do. Even if you just say ":)" or "What?":D**


	2. Chapter 2: Fawn

The male deer had stayed with us through most of the summer that year, only leaving four or five times to do whatever it was he did away. As the dreaded smell of autumn came his scent became more bitter, and other deer like him began to appear. I saw it all through sound. They would always fight with their heads, standing on two legs and shoving until one bleed too much to keep on. They would circle each other, bend back their legs, lower their heads, and charge at each other over and over until it was done.

Auha changed in her scent as well, the same sort of bitterness, and so did most of her group, but the girls didn't fight the same. They were more content being larger than another, I liked to suppose, and being closest to the male. I breathed in my own scent many times, tasting for the difference in myself, but I never found it. But even without it Auha had become more interested in me in a way that I couldn't yet understand. She spent nights nuzzled against me closely. In winter this had been normal, but in summer and early autumn she had not been quite as close, and even in winter she hadn't cuddled quite the same. As I felt under her fur I knew she wasn't doing it for warmth since her skin was warmer than mine. At the end of autumn just as it became winter, she made herself the last one to mix her scent with the male, though to me she seemed reluctant. The same night she didn't hesitate to nuzzle me again. It had become the way we slept.

Through that winter Auha and two others made extra efforts to stay warm, though all Auha used was me. Her belly became rounder and when I put my hands or tendrils against it something inside would often push back. The warmth there was more than the rest of her, and before long I swore that there was another being within her.

The other two gave birth first. It was at the end of winter, when the taste of pollen was fresh to my senses. I was unsure at first what had happened, smelling only a faint smell of injury and blood and milk, but Auha made it clear to me. Once spring had fully arrived, she laid down in soft grass away from me and huffed words of injury. It surprised me, and I remember wondering for just a moment if she was ill before I smelled the blood. It became evident before long what was happening, and why I hadn't known before.

Her fawn was perfectly silent, so small I didn't see her with her mind or nerves, nearly motionless, and almost entirely scentless. Assuming the other fawns were the same, it explained why I hadn't noticed them before. I breathed in my own scent again, wondering if my own lack of scent was why I couldn't think of where I had come from, or why I couldn't think of a mother of my own.

Because of my wonder, finding the little fawn became a game of mine. Auha was almost never near the fawn at first, as though she were terrified to give her a scent of any kind. The fawn would never speak to me, nor did she give anything away about her own form. I honestly didn't know if the fawn was girl or boy, so I assumed girl for my own mind since she was nameless. Once the fawn learned to walk, she began to stay with her mother more, mostly bringing the scent of milk into the air. She also walked with me, though she was the only fawn to do so. The other two mothers kept their fawns away from me or the fawns just chose to be a distance from me. One of them had had twins, I saw through their minds and presence, and the other a single fawn like Auha. But both mothers kept a distance from my fawn, which I realized was strange. Something was wrong with my fawn that made them worried – not hateful or without love, mind you – to have her near, while none of them seemed worried for the other three fawns. I wished I understood what they saw, but I didn't yet know that I was blind. They didn't mind my little fawn when I was near her, though, and though Auha seemed just as worried for her own fawn as the others, she seemed to prefer me near the fawn. I couldn't yet understand why.

The more I fathered my fawn, though, the more I realized that these deer had a beginning, a beginning that in myself I could not recall. I wondered for the first time where I had come from, wondered if my own scentlessness really _had_ been why I was alone for so many countless winters – or if I was really as infinite as I felt. Had I really spent so many dreadful, cold years alone? I remembered in my earliest memories a feeling of happiness and a love for the moldy world around me, but never once could I recall anything other than trees and reptiles and birds and insects. The realization made me lonely, but luckily I had Auha's company and the little fawn.

But this state of mind for me was how I stayed, as though someone had carved me this new way, until the next nearly-winter – or maybe two of them. My fawn was not yet mature, though not fawn anymore. It is where the world changed.

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**Author's Note: Hello again. :) Please tell me what you think of this chapter. It may seem slow, but the next chapter definitely will not be. I hope you enjoyed this, and again, please give me an opinion. :)**


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